So, last week I finally got around to seeing Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, the film whose preview inspired this post and subsequent fun discussion in the comments. It’s a frustrating film, in many ways: essentially a long commercial for a hyperreal, pastiche-y Gothic South that is best—only—enjoyed by understanding the film’s repeated claims that it is in search of an “authentic” or “essential” South as empty slogans along the lines of Coke’s claims to be “it!” or Nike’s imperative to “Just do it!” In fact, director Andrew Douglas got his start making commercials for Nike and Microsoft, and the same ratio of production values to meaningful content prevails here—that is, high : none.
The website for the film is totally obsessed with the word “authentic”—it’s nearly as common as commas—and yet Wrong-Eyed Jesus is at least a much of a postmodern pastiche as O Brother Where Art Thou, only O Brother didn’t cloak itself in the pretensions of mystic solemnity. The odd contrast of alleged seriousness and superficiality becomes clear whenever the movie’s putative narrator, musician and pseudo-mystic Jim White, opens his mouth and releases a stream of Faulkner quotations and vapid clichés (“Between grief and nothing, you’ll take grief…you know you’re alive when you’re sad,” etc etc). It’s not clear if he’s deliberately putting us on, or if he believes that he’s offering unique, individual insight instead of—as seems to be the case—playing a human jukebox loaded full of phrases that are, as Walker Percy said in a different context, worn thin as poker chips. It’s important to understand this about the movie going in, because if you take its claim to be the chronicle of an ontological odyssey seriously, you’re going to get real pissed, real early.
For me it was the moment when Jim White—whose music I tend to like pretty well, though his catalog is uneven—notes that he didn’t grow up in the South, but that he moved there when he was three. This accident of biography and geography, he says, means that he can never be a “true” Southerner, and must get by with being the best imitation of a Southerner he can. OK, fair enough, even if that claim turns on an opposition between “true” and “imitation” Southerners that won’t even stand up to a hard squint through a cracked monocle. But then he goes on to say that because he has chosen his Southernness, this is somehow better than being born into it—like “choosing your grace,” he offers by way of comparison. There’s a smugness and a condescension implied in that statement that plagues this film, a film which, far from trying to understand or uncover anything about the South, instead represents the South as a batch of signifiers that one can appropriate to construct a new identity, a catalog of fashion accessories that one can use to create a new look for Spring. Convert your look from Goth to Southern Goth(ic)—just add boots and ambiguously stained wife-beater! Rather than trying to get at the complexity of the South—there’s nary a black face nor a Wal-Mart in sight, just for starters—this movie presents the poor-white, backwoods, Pentecostal South as an elaborate stage set, a prop-filled landscape that you can lend artists a veneer of authenticity, a depth and resonance that their work might otherwise lack. It’s the sort of movie that makes you think real deep thoughts at Sundance.
But, taken on those terms, purely as spectacle, it’s achingly beautiful. The opening shot, of a spotted dog running through a swampy and vine-strangled stretch of woods, all in muted grays and greens, is absolutely breathtaking. The image of a house floating in the water, of a beautiful woman sitting in an abandoned car, of a late-night river baptism—combine these with some spooky old-time folk music, and it’s all gorgeous, evocative, moving on some fundamentally emotional level. There are a number of moody, atmospheric musical performances starring Johnny Dowd and the Handsome Family and various other alterna-folk luminaries, plus at least one “authentic” old-timer to round out the bill. My favorite musical number is a duet with Dowd and Maggie Brown on Dowd’s tune “First There Was,” with him in a barber shop and her in an adjacent beauty parlor, the camera moving back and forth from room to room as they trade verses. And if all this movie wanted to be was a series of folk music videos, all barbershops and burned-out houses and banjos, I would be just fine with it. In fact, it pretty much fails as anything else; any movie that claims to be about an “authentic” or “essential” South and that also features—without comment, caption, or context—David Johansen (of New York Dolls and Buster Poindexter fame) playing music in a seedy hotel room as though they’d just happened upon this cool old guy there when they made a run to the ice machine is problematic at best.
So, but let me be clear: I don’t have a problem with David Johansen re-fashioning himself as an old-time Southern musician, nor with Jim White or anyone else playing dress up with a tattered and grimy Southern costume, or with the suggestion that much of what we think of as “the South” is just a hyperreal simulation that anyone can buy or sell and that has nothing to do with an “essence.” In fact, I think the filmmakers missed a real opportunity to talk to someone like Johansen, who’s obviously all about re-defining himself and exploring the plasticity of public identity, about what it is that is so seductive about the idea of dressing up all Southern and stuff. I do have a bit of a problem with filmmakers promoting this fakey, hyperreal, simulated South as “authentic” and “real,” obviously. And that probably wouldn’t bother me too much either if all the images on display were merely of things, of stuff—old signs and old stores and old guitars and junker cars. But there are people in this movie, too, people who, one presumes, weren’t paid by the filmmakers to act a particular role: a woman who spends long minutes sitting in front of her trailer detailing her various tattoos, and the tattoos that she covered up with other tattoos; the toothless waitress at a diner; the vacant-eyed meth-addicts in a small-town jail; the coal miner who, surrounded on all sides by burnt-black rock and machinery, says that he loves that his job keeps him close to nature; the worshippers at a charismatic church.
There’s real pain and suffering in these lives, real brokenness (and one assumes real joy, though we don’t see much of this) in the poverty-stricken South that Jim White and camera crew drive through, and true, these folks get to tell their stories on camera, get to speak when otherwise they might not. And yet, the effect of the movie is that they get flattened into scenery. Their real stories are there just to add an extra layer of “authenticity” to the pose of mystic Southernness that this movie is promoting, to make it a more appealing commodity. But in some ways the opposite occurs: by pairing interviews with “real” Southerners with performances and stagey conversations with various musicians and cast members, cutting back and forth seamlessly and with little context, the film actually encourages us to see the real lives as fake, as staged, as safely “other.” No one really lives like that, of course. Do they? The movie rarely succeeds in making it possible for us to empathize with them for more than a moment before it pulls away, makes clear that “we,” whoever we are, are not them.
So, but I still think you should see it. It’s pretty.
where was this playing?
Via Netflix—it came out on DVD just this month.
I tussled with similar thoughts. While I’m intrigued with Johansen’s chameloeon-like abilities to refashion himself into a “Harry Smith,” but reading yr report reminds me of many of my chief complaints regarding the last-days of the actual Oxford-based Oxford American.
I felt like I wasn’t reading fiction and articles about the place I knew and loved: I felt like the focus of a “oh, look at this, it’s so precious! It’s so genuine” eulogy scribbled by a twentysomething NYC-based writer who’d taken a turn in the South (Naipul pun intended). And I didn’t like that. In fact, I hate it.
I also think the search for “authenticity”—as much as I sometimes seek it myself—may be a little misguided. Rusted and bullet-riddled signs for outdated brands of gasoline may be “authentic,” but my most genuine/authentic experiences are simply sitting on a friend’s porch and talking about what we did that day. “Southern,” one supposes, is less rusted signs and crumbling shacks and more a place of mind.
That’s why Willie Morris was always Southern, even while editing Harper’s—and why Donna Tartt is not Southern at all, nor can I find traces of Southerness in her fiction. It’s why Gillian Welch, that holy native of California, was actually born in Tennessee in 1869, and why Keith Richards got Mississippi down cold decades ago.
It’s also why Jim White may never get it right, or why I’d at least look askance at him in a bar, and call him a Yankee.
Do you remember the time you defined the Delta for me? And then there was the time you defined the South. I’m not sure I have gotten it all yet, but that which lies under it all, I think, is “home.” That I understand. We all have that and it is authentic, and predates pretending and covering up ourselves and our homely places. The flick trailer reminds a bit of a serious version of Dancing Outlaw, (though that certainly had a serious side, too).
i haven’t seen this movie. but i did get excited when i heard about it. then i watched the trailer and had a similar response. it seems like a very interesting and textural movie – but certainly not an authentic look at the south. as gorjus said, the authentic south doesn’t make for such oddball visual poetry. you just have to be there enjoying it.
the fact that jim white claims he made a conscious decision to be southern raises a giant red flag. that’s like me telling my mom in the 4th grade that i was going “new wave.”
also, if you moved here when you were three and lived in the south ever since, i’d say that qualifies you as southern. all of your memories would have been formed in the south. i think what mr. white means is that he will never be a poverty-stricken meth wife with a perfectly dilapitated trailer and homemade tattoos.
i used to work with a girl who was exactly the opposite. she told everyone she was from NYC, even though she had lived in slidell since the age of two.
Try telling people up north you’re a Southerner when they know you live in Florida! Of course, Tallahassee is 13 miles from the GA border, surrounded by a plantation belt and tobacco fields and sports some of the most majestic Spanish-moss draped Live Oaks you’ll ever see. Don’t get me started on the Bob (Not Jim) Whites.
I remember when I discovered my “Southerness”. After years of rebelling against the vapidity of quasimiddleclassruralencroachingsuburbanpublicschool life through the convenient, but life-altering if not lifesaving, avenues of punk rock, somehow, somewhere, during and after my sophomore year in college, I began to “appreciate” my southern identity. I discovered Larry Brown, it felt cool, I was gonna get a Ph.D. in southern lit, I knew who and what I was. And now I’ve spent a few years at least a little bit ashamed of all that. I never want to leave the south. I love it. I find it astounding that this economically backward, even exploited place, has contributed to this country’s and this world’s culture in ways that can’t be overstated. I play banjo—clawhammer banjo—for God’s sake; and yet I cringe at that 21-year-old “southerner” I wanted so badly to be, while I have more than a grudging respect for the shaved head 17-year-old in the punk band.
I’ve moved from suspicion to something bordering on disgust for things that wrap themselves in southerness. It seems like a cheap brand name, or the last refuge of a scoundrel. “Be something!” I want to tell it, “Do something! Stop relying on the accident of geography for meaning.” But I also don’t want it to be this way. Can anyone salvage meaning for the South, from the South, for this erstwhile southerner?
As a segue: I think that’s part of why I really liked JuJitsu For Christ. It doesn’t rest its laurels on its southern identity. But I’ll leave that discussion for later.
As a transplant to the quasi southern state of TN, I have been trying to understand southern. I’ve been reading southern literature and history (midway through Taylor Branch’s trilogy of Civil Rights history). When I compare Welty, Faulkner, Wright, and Morrison, I have to go with Wright and Morrison every time. I do think that Butler scratches into a bit of both flavors. However, when ya’ll talk about the blessings of southern culture, I have to admit I get really nervous. Convince me.
BRD, you just named them! Our wonderful writers, our amazingly talented musicians (who crafted/created nearly every single dominant mode of music in America today (blues, jazz, rock and roll)), the advances made in civil rights for all Americans . . . plus, we make great food. And we’re good in the sack. &tc.
brd, I’ve got a longer response to come, but I think it’s interesting that you separated Wright out from Faulkner and Welty, as though Wright isn’t “Southern.” But he is, even if his most famous novel is set in Chicago. This is the problem that Butler identifies in J4C—when we say “Southerner,” we still too often see a white man in our heads, but of course the South isn’t simply white.